Animal Instinct: Bucky Turco's Greatest Internet Moments

Who says the Internet is killing real journalism? This week, former Complex staffer and current AnimalNewYork honcho Bucky Turco saw his camera phone pic of a napping La Guardia Airport Transportation Safety Administration worker get picked up by the mainstream media, resulting in said worker getting re-assigned to desk duty as well as rejoicing from beleaguered tattletales investigative web journalists the world over.

Of course this isn't the first time Bucky (a.k.a. the Shitstarter a.k.a. the demon Internet spawn of Upton Sinclair, William Randolph Hearst, and Larry Flynt a.k.a. the Wet Snitch) has put the world on blast. Love him, or (let's be real, more likely than not) hate him, just don't doubt his ability to make things really interesting, as you'll see with our timeline of his greatest Internet moments...

September 2001: BT Goes Guerilla with Diane Sawyer at Ground Zero
• Bucky only published this last year, but the video is from the evening of 9/11, when the enterprising Mr. Turco rollerbladed down to the still smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center to rubberneck shoot some documentary footage. Bucky ran into fellow 4th Estater Diane Sawyer (of course!) whose ABC News crew was unable to shoot their own footage because of a media blackout at the site and instead enlisted Young Buck to get stock for them. See Diane and crew distract the emergency workers by handing out water and face shields! See Diane walk away so Bucky can get better shots! See "Bucky Turco's Fixed Gear Fascination" become a recurring segment on Good Morning America! Stranger things have happened, trust.

May 2007: BT Exposes Graffiti Artist Banksy
• Ever heard the old journalism cliche "What the New Yorker can't quite do in 6000 words, Bucky Turco does in 15 minutes of web searching"? Of course you haven't, 'cause we just made it up, but in the case of Banksy, it's true. TNY devoted a full feature to the "mysterious" Banksy, and gave BT the rather obvious clue he needed to find a pic of the then elusive artist. Then the so-called "art terrorist" got all cease and desisty on us, a bluff Bucky promptly called.

March 2009: BT Blows Up Complex's Photo Retouch Game
• News flash: Magazines touch up some of the photos they publish!!! Who knew? Well, former Complex employee Bucky Turco for one. So when we mistakenly posted some unaltered flicks of our April/May cover girl Kim Kardashian, BT got his Sesame Street-style "Name five things different about these photos" game on with the quickness, posting before and after shots of our shoot. The result? A lot of pickup for Animal, even more for us, and a chance for Kim to pose on other magazines boasting of her Photoshop free bod. Win, win, win (plus we're still tight with Kimmy, so no harm, no foul).

May 2009: BT Gets First Interview With the Hipster Grifter
• Ok, so it's not like he tracked down J.D. Salinger or something, but when Bucky was the first to speak with then-felon-on-the-lam Kari Ferrell a.k.a. the Hipster Grifter last spring, it was kind of a big deal (at least in certain incestuous media circles). Positing his exclusive as "Animal Spends the Night with Kari Ferrell" (dude knows how to sell a post, ya dig?), Bucky had the Internet going certifiably nuts from Williamsburg to the Lower East Side. But wait, the cycle of inane hipster fuckery gets even better! After H.G. served six months in a Utah jail for fraud, Benevolent Bucky gave her a job at Animal, where she presumably is a hot dog hall monitor and gets to write awesome blog leads like "Even though I didn't steal near the amount that was alleged, I do admit to manipulating my share of individuals (usually out of semen and chocolate)."

January 2010: BT Helps Senator Pimp Daughters
• When filibuster-enabling Republican Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown joked about his daughters being available during his victory speech last week, Bucky promptly got his Animal dun Cajun Boy on the case to dig up photos of the comely Brown girls. And the very next day (damn they're good!), they did just that, posting a pic of Brown with his daughters in seashell-top bikinis. If Brown ends up voting for the Democrats' health care bill, you'll know Buck's got something really juicy on him.